NATIONAL REVIEW: PREVENTING REPUBLICANS FROM BURNING EVERYTHING TO THE GROUND IS THE DEMOCRATS' RESPONSIBILITY

An editorial from National Review:

Democrats Will Regret Their Move against Marjorie Taylor Greene

... House Democrats voted to boot [Marjorie Taylor Greene] from her committee assignments in an act that they will surely come to regret, perhaps as soon as January 2023.

If the majority can keep members of the opposition party off of committees based on incendiary comments, it’s not clear why the GOP ever let, say, Maxine Waters serve on any committees when it had control of the chamber, or why it ever will again.

Kicking off Greene will come to be remembered as another inflection point in the steady unraveling of institutional norms on Capitol Hill.

You know what was a real "inflection point in the steady unraveling of institutional norms on Capitol Hill"? Electing someone to Congress who believes that the Speaker of the House should be executed for treason. (And who also believes the last Democratic president and last Democratic presidential candidate prior to Joe Biden should be executed, for the same reason.)

Or, if you want to say that voters are entitle to choose any candidates they please and their choices can't be blamed on institutional gatekeepers, then the inflection point was House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy's declaration, months before Greene was elected and after appalling Greene videos and posts were unearthed, that he'd welcome her to Congress and assign her to committees.

But notice the argument here: It's wrong to damage institutional norms, but that's what Democrats have done -- and therefore Republicans have no choice but to do it right back to them.

Why? If Republicans value institutional norms...

Okay, stop laughing. Let's just assume they do for the sake of argument.

If Republicans value institutional norms, and believe that it's destructive of those norms to exclude members from committees for speech, what prevents them from simply not responding in kind? If this is a norm, and the preservation of the norms is important, why not just work to preserve it, regardless of what Democrats do?

But that's not how it works. Democrats are doing a bad thing, and then Democrats will be responsible when Republicans do the same bad thing, because we simply can't ask Republicans to be responsible for their own actions.

That's what the editors of National Review are arging here.